Music review: Tis the season for Messiah
Even after 282 years, there’s nothing quite like Handel’s Messiah to cap a year and lift the spirits. An invigorating performance by the ASO under Canadian conductor Ivars Taurins made sure of that.
You know it’s that time of the year when Messiah gets its annual dusting off. Never mind that Handel wrote his marvellous oratorio to celebrate Easter, or that we’re not quite at Christmas anyway. Hearing the “Hallelujah chorus” could not come at a better moment.
And to have the full, uncut Messiah done with such great commitment was a joy. The experienced hands of Ivars Taurins were largely how it happened. Thanks to his long experience with Toronto’s Tafelmusik Orchestra and Chamber Choir, all this work’s undulating shapes felt like familiar territory to this skilled Canadian. He can conduct it entirely from memory; Graham Abbott is another conductor who famously has done that.
The particular interest in Taurins’ vision of Messiah was to see how far he could bring the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra into the arena of historically informed performance. This is his speciality and the reason he was invited in as director.
We didn’t quite get to the stage of the string players discarding chinrests and swapping to gut strings, but a lot else felt absolutely right, and it did seem that significant rehearsal time had been given over to attuning the ASO’s ears to “Baroque sound”.
It wasn’t just the light, detaché bowing that is de rigueur in period instrument playing. Vivacity and spirit were the order of the day. Everything felt sparklingly neat but at the same time dynamically linked. Taurins has a way of gathering momentum so that each next chorus feels like a magnificent human accomplishment.
A case in point was the “Hallelujah chorus”. Embarrassing indecision can happen in Messiah when the audience cannot decide whether to stand and yield to tradition, or remain seated and resist it. Supposedly, the idea of rising to one’s feet goes back to King George II at the first London performances of Messiah in 1743, when the unpopular monarch sensed there was something mightier than himself.
After a momentary hesitation, the Adelaide Town Hall audience did likewise, perhaps sensing the same. How traditions linger across the centuries – especially if the performance attains true splendour, as this did.
With a mere 21 string players, the ASO proved the point that compact can be more powerful, as so often seems to be the case with Handel. Dividends come with thinking small. One could actually hear, and enjoy, the musicianship of Anthony Hunt on harpsichord and Joshua van Konkelenberg on chamber organ. Their tapestry of sound with an alert, responsive string band was gorgeous. Helping no end were delicately light basso continuo accompaniments in the recitatives, and a scintillating trumpet solo from David Khafagi in “The Trumpet Shall Sound”.
Yet Messiah is ultimately, of course, about singing. Adelaide Chamber Singers were the largest outfit they might have ever been, at 38 singers, but still the emphasis was on containment and precision. They were in fine fettle, having been well prepared by director Christie Anderson (who could be spotted among the sopranos), and Taurins enthusiastically adopted ACS as if it were his own baby.
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His driving, sweeping gestures did everything to raise Messiah’s choruses skyward.
Adelaide Symphony Orchestra presents ‘Messiah’ at the Town Hall. Photo: Claudio Raschella
The solo singers picked for this performance are the most distinctive quartet ASO has ever assembled for Messiah. One was struck right away by how starkly differently they sounded. Samantha Clarke is a brightly lit operatic soprano, while mezzo Fiona Campbell has a captivatingly darker, recessed voice. Andrew Goodwin answers more to the true oratorio singer with his clear declamation and bell-like tenor, but Andrew O’Connor was the most characterful of the four with his fruity, resonantly deep bass.
The trajectory right from the start was one of liberated expression.
Goodwin delivered “Comfort ye” with a wonderful spaciousness, and Campbell did similarly at the beginning of Part 2 in an emotionally rending account of “He was despised and rejected”. Each aria was filled with individualism.
Interestingly, at no point in Messiah do the soloists ever sing together – mostly it is solos plus a few duets. Therefore over this work’s more than two-hour span, variety can become a welcome thing: Messiah is actually longer than Beethoven’s Fidelio and in duration even exceeds Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.
So if the arias felt like separate performances rather than different facets of the whole, it at least kept interest on the go. One’s suspicion sometimes is that Messiah is an opera in disguise. Liberal lashings of coloratura that Handel gives the singers early on are proof of that. They are difficult to pull off, and some fuzziness and uncertainty with pitching did appear, but things settled and all singers in the end gave of their best.
Smiles all round said it all. Somehow, Handel still manages to conjure an uncanny sense of occasion and lift the soul.
Halleluiah to that.
This is a review of ASO’s Messiah on December 7 in the Town Hall. Look out for the 2025 season brochure to see its upcoming concerts in the new year.